Play it as it lays, a novel

Literary fiction

First published: 1970
Print length: 214 pagesSimon and Schuster, 1979

Description

Maria Wyeth, a thirty-one-year-old actress, begins the novel in a psychiatric hospital near Los Angeles, trying to impose order on the events that brought her there. Her stalled career and failing marriage unfold in fragments against the false glamour of 1960s Hollywood. An uncertain pregnancy draws her into questions of paternity and a dangerous search for an illegal abortion, while her devotion to Kate, her young daughter living in a treatment facility, gives her one fragile point of attachment. As divorce and social disorder close in, Maria retreats into freeway driving, alcohol, casinos, motels, and reckless encounters. Spare and unsentimental, the novel follows a woman confronting a culture—and a private life—that seems to offer motion without meaning.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Fragmentary · Minimalist · Spare

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Bleak · Detached · Intimate · Unsettling

Structure

Fragmented · Nonlinear · Vignettes

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionIdentityIsolationMarriageMental healthParenthood

About Joan Didion

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist whose career ranged across fiction, literary journalism, criticism, memoir, and drama. Beginning with a Vogue essay contest and later writing for magazines including Life, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books, she became a defining practitioner of New Journalism. Her work joins close reporting to a sharply controlled personal voice, with unusual attention to sentence structure and to the meanings carried by atmosphere and detail. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, California becomes both subject and testing ground: its counterculture, Hollywood surfaces, political tensions, and weakened institutions reveal a broader instability in American public life. The spare, fragmented novel Play It as It Lays brings that unease into fiction. Later works such as The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights turn her methods inward, examining grief and memory without forcing experience into tidy explanation. Across these forms, Didion is distinguished by her alertness to the stories people use to impose order, and to the moments when those stories fail.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Language: English
ISBN: 9780671248468

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.